I love my GoPro HD for shooting video. It’s tiny and light, and shoots in four HD modes, from 720p to 1080p. The only downside I could see–or NOT see–was that there was no way to view or playback what you shot. You could only hope that when you got back home, and finally looked at the footage, you got the shots that were intended.
To be fair, it’s hard to miss much with the super wide angle lens, but framing the closer shots was basically a guessing game. The other unknown was that if the angle wasn’t quite right, the shot could end up being too dark, even on the brightest days!
So I was so happy when the newest GoPro add-on became available. It’s called the GoPro LCD BacPac, and it’s a color monitor which allows you to view and also play back what you’ve shot. All functions can be controlled with one button. It comes with a clear plastic enclosure that simply replaces the existing backdoor enclosure that originally came with the GoPro. It fits all current GoPro 1080s. (must have the port on the back of GoPro)
The other plus is that now you can view the menu functions on the monitor as you cycle through them, so it makes it easier to clearly see what function does what. The monitor has play, fast forward, rewind, pause, a built in speaker, brightness control, and a 60 sec. “off” function that will turn off the monitor within one minute of the last button push, which conserves battery power. Great little add-on!
The darkness that you get is most often from the footage being underexposed. Since the camera relies on a auto-exposure mode, it is constantly reading the scene and taking a gray reading from that. If your scene is not in that range (say a bright sky) the camera will make that scene gray, and by doing so, it is underexposing the scene. To counter this, try to keep the center axis of your camera pointed at something that is in the lighting situation that you want to expose correctly, and that you think looks like a middle gray tone. So if you are out unicycling in the sun at a park, fresh green grass is usually a decently close equivalent to middle gray. The consumer-cameras like the go-pro most often do not have many settings and just meter a circle in the center of the image.
Cool add-on, but too bad it makes it bigger. I’d still use the camera by itself, and the attachment only for review and/or set-up.
I checked around and found a local motorcycle accessory store that had it. And Dane, even with the monitor, it’s still a tiny (but powerful) HD video camera, and what little weigh and size it adds, it’s more than worth it to me, now that I can SEE what I’m shooting!
Here’s an example of how a slightly wrong angle with the GoPro can make the shot “dark”. This was shot with the GoPro and you can see at :25, as i’m about to jump off a bolder, it’s dark, then as the filmer moves with the drop and changes position, the shot gets brighter. And btw, what you see at :25 was artificially “lightened” FOUR times in editing in order to make it brighter, so you get an idea how dark it actually was. Same “dark” effect happens at :33 and then in the next clip you can actually see it go from very dark, to normal as he tracks the shots. This could have been avoided if we had had the monitor.
I guess I’m just used to setting up cameras. It’s not too difficult to figure out the area that the camera is pointed at and where it is metering exposure from. Get down to level with the camera from the side, check the angle it is pointing, and then stand behind it and check where it is pointing. Done!
Haha, that’s why it helps to see what you’re shooting, just to be sure! The GoPro does has very lousy low-light quality, and even in daylight, the slightest change in camera angle/direction can cause the shot to be darker than it actually is outside. Moot point now, since I have a view finder to confirm the shot before I shoot it.
That’s the problem with automatic exposure cameras. It will still happen with the LCD, you can just be aware of it now. I wish it was manual so I could tell you how to shoot it perfectly always.
Are you aware you sound more like a commercial for this thing than an actual commercial for this thing?
And your smiley to post ratio in this thread is 1-1.
